Bernard Harcourt | June 26 | Gothamist
Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York City on a pledge to eliminate the racist policing strategies of the past. On the campaign trail, he challenged NYPD’s discriminatory stop-and-frisk policy, which disproportionately targeted African-American and Hispanic New Yorkers—almost 85 percent of those stopped were of people of color. De Blasio spoke the language of police reform and progress.
Yet on day one of his mayoralty, de Blasio betrayed his word—and even more, the Black and Hispanic communities of New York City—by bringing back an even more blatantly discriminatory policing strategy: the practice of aggressive misdemeanor arrests known as “broken windows policing.”
Before even settling into City Hall, de Blasio appointed former-mayor Rudy Giuliani’s first police commissioner, Bill Bratton, to head the NYPD again, with the very same mandate of broken-windows policing: to crack down on minor quality-of-life offenses.
And even as Bratton resigned two-and-a-half years later, de Blasio maintained that broken windows policing was “still the right approach.” In effect, rather than reform policing, de Blasio doubled-down and returned the city to the Giuliani-style approach.
Read the full article here.